Thursday, March 01, 2012

Andrew Breitbart, ass-kicker. While I didn't always agree with his tactics, I always understood his logic and motivation. A fearless fighter has fallen.

My heart first goes out to the beautiful Susie Bean Breitbart, and the four beautiful children that they brought into this world together. No sympathetic words, no heartfelt eulogies are going to make this more bearable for any of them. Yet somehow I hope that the combined energy of the multitude of condolences bring a modicum of strength, and of peace. If not in these immediate days, in the days to come.

I remember the first time I met Andrew, back in his Drudge days. So confident, so determined. Striking to look at, energizing to converse with. We were all little islands in the sea of left that is Los Angeles, yet somehow there was a buoyancy to the mission, an optimism of being on the side of right versus wrong.

And oh how right he made it look, with his accessibility, his straight answers, his refusal to let a lie have the last word.

Breitbart's critics have been the apotheosis of willful blindness and mindless extrapolation. Half of them slammed him for homophobia -- regardless that he had been one of the main champions of GOProud, a homosexual Republican group, being included at 2011's CPAC. The other half slammed him as a "faggot" -- regardless that he was a married father of four. And yet he carried on, undaunted, entering lion's den after lion's den, armed with a sense of righteousness that was unflappable.

I have watched a wave of "I am Spartacus"-like declarations flow through the internet today in vows to carry on and indeed expand the path that Andrew laid down. And it gives me hope. That's what wake-up calls tend to do. When such an inspirational figure that you expected to be around for at least another thirty years is suddenly and stunningly taken, the only acceptable way to react is to pick up and run with the torch before the light even has a chance to dim.

Two years ago Andrew inspired me to begin a film about a wonderful and interesting subject, and then facilitated the introduction and thus the ability to begin it. My heart goes out to that subject, the delightful Brandon Darby, for whom my heart aches today. In Andrew he found a champion, a support and shield, and, perhaps, even a little bit of a father figure. Someone who believed in him... believed in his quest, and in his heart. And Brandon is just one of many for whom Andrew Breitbart was not just a catalyst, but a lifejacket, a cheerleader and a guide.

Rush Limbaugh today in eulogy asked for a thousand more Breitbarts. It would be so nice if that turned out to be an underestimation.

COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) - A man is dead after the motel clerk he tried to sexually assault and rob early Monday morning fought back and killed him, deputies said.

Investigators say 43-year-old Vincent Carson of Orangeburg, SC, entered the Days Inn motel at 133 Plumbers Road near I-20 and North Main Street sometime before 6 a.m.

As the female clerk went into the breakfast room to prepare breakfast, she found Carson waiting inside. The victim said Carson held a knife to her throat and said "this is a robbery."

Investigators said when her attacker slipped the knife into his pants pocket to begin tying her up with plastic ties, the woman pulled a handgun from under her shirt, turned and fired into the man's chest at point blank range.

The victim was about 100 pounds lighter than Carson and stood at least a foot shorter than him, investigators said.

When deputies got to the scene just after 6 a.m., they found the suspect unresponsive on the floor. Richland County Coroner Gary Watts said Carson died from a single gunshot to the chest.

Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said Carson's intent was not only to rob the motel, but also to rape the clerk.

"There's no doubt that was his intent," said Lott. "Not only was he going to rob her, but he was going to sexually assault her. Now what was he going to do after that assault was over with, we don't know."

The clerk was not injured, but was taken to Palmetto Baptist Hospital as a precaution.

The suspect was wanted in at least one other motel robbery in the Midlands. The Orangeburg County Sheriff's Department was looking for Carson in connection with a July 14 robbery at the Hampton Inn on US Highway 601.

In that incident, deputies said Carson broke into the room of two elderly tourists and took their money, their cell phone and their vehicle.

Lott said that this was an unfortunate situation in which the victim feared for her life and defended herself.

Lott said the clerk had been victimized in one of two recent robberies at the same Days Inn and had gotten permission from her employer to carry a .22 caliber gun. The suspect in both of those incidents was identified as 22-year-old David Wesley Watson.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Ya gotta love a woman who will leap to her husband's defense if ever necessary. Good goin', girl!

It was an admirable right-handed whack - a spontaneous open-handed slap delivered into the custard-pie throwers' face.

A flash of pink, a raised arm and a solid connection was all that was needed to catapult Wendi Murdoch from supportive wife to unlikely hero of the day, trending worldwide on Twitter just moments after protester Jonnie Marbles' now-infamous 'splat'.

Leaping to her husband's defense, Mrs Murdoch, 43, sent aclear message of strength - beyond the boundaries of common assault - that the Murdoch empire will fight.

But then Mrs Murdoch, who has just produced her first movie, is used to holding her own.

The Chinese third wife of the media magnate and centre of the phone hacking scandal counts Ivanka Trump and Tony Blair as close friends - and clearly knows exactly what she needs to do to get what she wants.

In his book, From Rupert's Adventures In China, Bruce Dover says that Mrs Murdoch moved to the USA when she was 19, sponsored by a married couple, Jake and Joyce Cherry, who befriended the then Wendi Deng while on travels in China.

She went on to marry Jake Cherry, a middle-aged engineer, when she was 21 years old, before separating and heading to study business at Yale.

She holds an MBA from the prestigious university and has played key roles in her husband's business in China, including being vice-president of business development for News Corp-owned Star TV less than a year after graduating.

According to Dover, Deng was 'hardworking and eager to learn, but also ambitious and single-minded in her desire to succeed. There was no doubt she put in the long hours required to excel. She impressed everyone with her energy, good humour and wit.'

In his biography about the Murdoch dynasty, Michael Wolff says the couple are madly in love thanks to a shared passion for business.

Old... but worth it if you missed it when it happened. Cate's making a speech to validate using tax dollars to fund the arts, and it is a doozy.

I'm completely in agreement that the arts are vital to a culture, but the private and municipal sectors do just fine providing for them.

This is an edited extract of the keynote speech Cate Blanchett gave to the Australian Performing Arts Market in Adelaide...

Australia has been enriched, challenged and changed by taking a stronger and more complex place on the world stage, rather than just selling ourselves as a great beach resort populated by smiling outdoorsy larrikins. Now, I know this from my own experience. I know this from having worked recently with Benedict Andrews. I know this from seeing a growth in my own husband's work. We can justify ourselves with economic indicators and KPIs and graphs and acquittals but it just makes us look like any other industry, and we are not.

The arts operate at the core of human identity and existence. They operate at the cutting edge of a science that is now trying to unravel the puzzle of consciousness and identity. ''Our experience, for all that we are the subject of it, is a mystery to us'': Emerson's wonderful hymn to the mystery of experience is not a piece of whimsy. It touches on the enduring source of cultural power in human life. How did we come to know, to understand, to grow? When did the pieces fall into place? Not on some graph. The graph is proof and proof comes afterwards. Proof is important to science because scientists start with speculation and conjecture to arrive at reality. Our job is to change reality, to challenge it, not prove it and explain it.

Now this little detour probably hasn't got much to do with the Australian Performing Arts Market, but I think it is important in this room because around the country, certainly, and I think in the world more generally, there's been a growing pressure on the arts to justify themselves, to prove their case, make their graphs and their pie-charts, and we have done it. We know the ripple effect of funding the arts leads to better dollar multipliers than many other expenditures and we know that cities with strong arts opportunities are more vibrant and attract more business and tourism. We know that most of the arts community works for lower wages and longer hours and this is only tenable because they are so proud of their work.

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But I want to make another point that I don't hear made often enough for my liking: the arts are a great employer. At the Sydney Theatre Company, we have a staff of about 130 at any particular time. The division is the interesting thing. Thirty of them might be artists working on a specific show - actors, directors, designers - and maybe 10 of them full-time staff who would be considered artists in our permanent employ. That means that about 90 people, more than double the number of artists, are employed to help create and realise the work of the company. We are a big company, yes, but my guess is the ratios are pretty similar all around the world. It's not just the artists who work in the arts. It is an entire highly skilled, highly committed and passionate community.

Anyway, what else do we know, and have studied and measured? We know that countries with strong cultural identities demonstrate greater social cohesion and on and on and on. Basically, all sorts of studies have been done, key-performance indicators, measured and indeed graphed.

But there is more. We do more than all that. We must remember the arts do more than just that. We process experience and make experience available and understandable. We change people's lives, at the risk of our own. We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place, in an otherwise constantly shifting and, let's face it, tiny outcrop in the middle of an infinity of nowhere.

What I'm saying I don't think anyone would deny, and yet no one seems prepared to constantly value that we give people the chance to make sense of the experience of their lives, their brief lives, and the tool to communicate that unique sense in another person or people.

This insistence on the importance of experience itself is a feature of these witnessing books and these witnessing lives, an insistence that history is not a concept or a force, but the brief, limited, unimportant lives of ordinary men and women involved in the business of just getting from one day to the next, just this, repeated a million times over.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

I generally tend to comment more on fascists than fetishists.... but this is insane. Insane and EWWW.

'I'm making a drink and realize the pasty tall fellow pouring orange juice into my glass is the man himself, QT,' she wrote.

'Realizing I kind of have to go for at it this point, in all my nerd glory blurt out: "I'm sure everyone tells you this but I f**king loved Reservoir Dogs.'

She claims that the pair kissed in a kitchen at the party after she told him that she did not like his Kill Bill films.

According to the email, Mr Tarantino said: 'Wow...I don't think anyone has said that to my face about my seminal films.'

She replied: 'Perhaps it's because you call them your seminal films. Shouldn't you wait for someone else to say that?'

Before he said, 'You know, you've got a mouth on you. I like that,' and the Oscar-winning film director put his arm around her and kissed her.

'At some point in our public makeout, Jamie Foxx comes over and without acknowledging me goes, "Yo QT, ready to roll?" Quentin looks at me and says "Want to come to my house?",' Miss Shah wrote in the email.

The couple went back to the director's house where they took pictures of themselves in a photo booth, which Miss Shah attached to the email as 'proof that this story even happened'.

Miss Shah said that she 'started panicking' when Mr Tarantino suggested they head to bed because 'the makeouts were really losing their appeal because you can only be sweated on so much'.

She then included a graphic description of his private parts and claims that Mr Tarantino asked if he could suck her toes while he masturbated.

'And thus began the weirdest ten minutes of my life - having my feet made out with by an Oscar winning filmmaker while he pleasured himself,' she wrote.

'In the morning, I snooped through Quentin's belongings while he was in the bathroom and now know his e-mail address,' she added.

Friday, June 24, 2011

The big story to come out of this speech is Obama claiming to have awarded a Medal of Honor to a live recipient, but mentioning one that received the award posthumously.

But even nuttier to me is what constitutes his claim of service in the first line. lol.

"Throughout my service, first as a senator and then as a presidential candidate and then as a President, I’ve always run into you guys. And for some reason it’s always in some rough spots. First time I saw 10th Mountain Division, you guys were in southern Iraq. When I went back to visit Afghanistan, you guys were the first ones there. I had the great honor of seeing some of you because a comrade of yours, Jared Monti, was the first person who I was able to award the Medal of Honor to who actually came back and wasn’t receiving it posthumously."

The problem with the second part? FTA:

The problem is, Jared Monti was killed in action in Afghanistan, on June 21, 2006. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously, September 17, 2009. President Obama handed the framed medal to his parents, Paul and Janet Monti. He and the First Lady comforted them in the Oval Office following the ceremony.

Friday, June 17, 2011

Here's the whole thing... an OpEd in the Daily Caller. Money quotes are at the end.

There is no issue more serious than war. Wars result in the loss of life and property. Wars are also expensive and an enormous economic burden.

Our Founders understood that waging war is not something that should be taken lightly, which is why Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution gives Congress — not the president — the authority to declare war. This was meant to be an important check on presidential power. The last thing the Founders wanted was an out-of-control executive branch engaging in unnecessary and unpopular wars without so much as a Congressional debate.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly the situation we have today in Libya.

That’s why I’ve joined several other members of Congress in a lawsuit against President Obama for engaging in military action in Libya without seeking the approval of Congress.

Of course, in 2007, then-Senator Obama spoke passionately about the need to go after the Bush administration for violating the War Powers Act — the very same thing he’s doing now. In fact, while speaking at DePaul University in October of 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama said the following:

“After Vietnam, Congress swore it would never again be duped into war, and even wrote a new law — the War Powers Act — to ensure it would not repeat its mistakes. But no law can force a Congress to stand up to the president. No law can make senators read the intelligence that showed the president was overstating the case for war. No law can give Congress a backbone if it refuses to stand up as the co-equal branch the Constitution made it.”

We are now taking Barack Obama’s past advice and standing up to the executive branch.

Of course, the War Powers Act is hardly an improvement on the U.S. Constitution because it does allow the president to go to war without the approval of Congress. But President Obama refuses to follow this law.

If a president does go to war unilaterally, the War Powers Act requires him to seek Congressional approval within 60 days. The president can get an extension of up to 90 days if he asks for more time — but President Obama did not do this.

His time is up.

The Obama administration recently issued a 38-page paper stating that Obama is not in violation of the War Powers Act because “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve U.S. ground troops.” Under this argument, President Obama could preemptively launch nuclear weapons against any country in the world without Congressional approval. Obviously, this is not what the Founders intended!

But even aside from violating the Constitution, it makes no economic sense for us to be engaged in yet another war overseas — especially during such tough economic times. For years now, we’ve been sending foreign aid to the very same Libyan government we’re now spending $10 million a day to fight. And it has been recently discovered that the Federal Reserve’s bank bailouts even benefited the Libyan National Bank. Now, we’re taxing the American people to bomb the very nation that we taxed them to prop up.

This makes no sense at all.

The Founding Fathers did not intend for the president to have the power to take our nation to war unilaterally without the approval of Congress.

It’s time for the president to obey the Constitution and put the American people’s national interest first.

Rep. Ron Paul represents Texas’s 14th Congressional District and is a Republican candidate for president.

The liberal bias of the mainstream media tilts so far left that any outlets not in that political lane, like the Drudge Report and Fox News Channel, look far more conservative than they really are, according to a UCLA professor's new book out next month.

In a crushing body blow to the pushers of the so-called "Fox Effect," which claims the conservative media is dragging the left into the center, UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose in Left Turn claims that "all" mainstream news outlets have a liberal bias in their reporting that makes even moderate organizations appear out of the mainstream and decidedly right-wing to news consumers who are influenced by the slant. [Read Fox's Huckabee slams MSNBC's Matthews, Scarborough over bias.]

"Fox News is clearly more conservative than ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and National Public Radio. Some will conclude that 'therefore, this means that Fox News has a conservative bias,'" he writes in an advance copy provided to Washington Whispers. "Instead, maybe it is centrist, and possibly even left-leaning, while all the others are far left. It's like concluding that six-three is short just because it is short compared toprofessional basketball players."

What's more, he says, "this point illustrates a common misconception about the Drudge Report. According to my analysis, the Drudge Report is approximately the most fair, balanced, and centrist news outlet in the United States. Yet, the overwhelming majority of media commentators claim that it has a conservative bias. The problem, I believe, is that such commentators mistake relative bias for absolute bias. Yes, the Drudge Report is more conservative than the average U.S. news outlet. But it is a logical mistake to use that to infer that it is based on an absolute scale."

And in further analysis sure to enrage critics of conservative media, Groseclose determines that Drudge, on a conservative to liberal scale of 0-100, with 50 being centrist, actually leans a bit left of center with a score of 60.4. The reason: Drudge mostly links to the sites of the mainstream media, with just a few written by Matt Drudge himself. "Since these links come from a broad mix of media outlets, and since the news in general is left-leaning, it should not be surprising that the slant quotient of the Drudge Report leans left," he writes. [Read Poll: Fox, O'Reilly most trusted news sources.]

The author developed a calculation to figure out the "political quotient" to find the bias of mediaoutlets and the average slant of an organization.

Groseclose opens his book quoting a well-known poll in which Washington correspondents declared that they vote Democratic 93 percent to 7 percent, while the nation is split about 50-50. As a result, he says, most reporters write with a liberal filter. "Using objective, social-scientific methods, the filtering prevents us from seeing the world as it actually is. Instead, we see only a distorted version of it. It is as if we see the world through a glass—a glass that magnifies the facts that liberals want us to see and shrinks the facts that conservatives want us to see." [Check out political cartoons about the Democratic Party.]

He adds: "That bias makes us more liberal, which makes us less able to detect the bias, which allows the media to get away with more bias, which makes us even more liberal."

Some key points:

"Every mainstream national news outlet in the United States has a liberal bias."

"Supposedly conservative news outlets are not far right. For instance, the conservative bias of [Fox's] Special Report is significantly less than the liberal bias of CBS Evening News."

"Media bias aids Democratic candidates by about 8 to 10 percentage points in a typical election. I find, for instance, that if media bias didn't exist, John McCain would have defeated Barack Obama 56 percent to 42 percent, instead of losing 53-46." [See editorial cartoons about Barack Obama.]

Perhaps the most useful part of his book is the slant ratings of the media. The numbers are based on a conservative-to-liberal 0-100 rating, with 50 being centrist:

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

That loud crash you just heard off in the distance was the New York Times finally hitting the bottom of the barrel with an embarrassing but expected thump.

Having long ago turned its back on objective journalism to become the mouthpiece for liberal ideology, the Democrat party, and corrupt unions, it was still somewhat of a surprise to see the compromised editors of the paper do something which might cause Anthony Weiner to recoil from its unseemly request.

On Friday, June 10th, the State of Alaska released more than 24,000 of former Governor Sarah Palin’s emails. A Democrat recently told me that some liberals get more satisfaction out of a Palin “mistake,” or in smearing her and her family with more political mud than in the actual killing of Bin Laden. Apparently.

The New York Times -- under the headline “Help Us Review The Sarah Palin E-Mail Records” -- has just asked its readers to help its reporters to “identify interesting and newsworthy emails, people, and events that we may want to highlight.” Interesting and newsworthy being nothing more than liberal code for anything which will inflict further pain and suffering upon Sarah Palin and her family.

At first, I honestly thought it was a joke. Maybe David Letterman and Jon Stewart’s writers got sick of being mindless servants to the left and decided to have some fun at the expense of the Grey Lady. But no. Those writers still do the bidding of the Messiah in the White House and The New York Times is beyond serious in arming its readers with pitch forks and torches as it eagerly sends its virtual mob out in search of the conservative monster. (It should be noted -- again predictably -- that the equally left-wing Washington Post initiated its own Sarah Palin email witch hunt)

Maybe next, The New York Times will ask its readers to become informants against their neighbors or even family members. "Tell us," the next New York Times headline might read, "who is not using "green" light bulbs, who is not driving a hybrid vehicle, who is sending their children to charter schools, who just ate at McDonald's, and who especially on your block or in your neighborhood, still believes in traditional values."

That headline and that request just seems like the next logical step in the New York Times spiraling flight from dignity and into literary dementia.

I don’t seem to remember The New York Times asking its readers to review the 2000 plus pages of Obama’s Healthcare bill, or to review the emails sent from the thuggish Service Employees International Union, or to help it get access to the names on the White House visitor logs team Obama is trying to hide, or to try and find anyone who might be able to prove if Obama actually had a higher G.P.A. in college than Joe Biden.

No. Facts and relevant information no longer interest The New York Times. Not when they can create an army of snitches to try and further harm the former governor of Alaska.

Surely, there must be one person at that paper shocked and humiliated by this request. Just one.

This news is hilarious, it really shows just how far off of the reservation the media is. When you've lost Ashton and Demi...

Is Hollywood softening its opinion on Sarah Palin?

Over the weekend, the former Alaska governor got a surprising show of support from actor Ashton Kutcher, who trashed the media for digging through thousands of emails Palin sent when she was in office.

"As much as I'm not a fan of Sarah Palin I find sifting through her emails repulsive and over reaching media," Kutcher said on Twitter.

The message was re-tweeted by his wife, actress Demi Moore, who added, "So agree!"

Their messages came as Palin got a boost from another potentially surprising source: David Mamet, the famously testy playwright, screenwriter and film director who confessed he's "crazy about" the ex-governor.

Ron Paul, the Texas congressman who has run for president before, did little to shake his image as a fringe candidate by talking too fast and dropping obscure subjects like "Keynesian bubble'' and "monetary policy'' into the conversation.

Just fabulous. No wonder the country is in so much trouble. Our monetary policy is, amongst other things, crushing us, and this reporter thinks it's an obscure, OBSCURE, subject. God help us.